Cultural Ecology – UGC NET Geography – Notes

Background

• In geography, cultural ecology developed in response to the “landscape morphology” approach of Carl O. Sauer. Sauer’s school was criticized for being unscientific and later for holding a “reified” or “superorganic” conception of culture. Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment.
• These cultural ecologists focused on flows of energy and materials, examining how beliefs and institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were as much a part of the ecology as any other organism. Important practitioners of this form of cultural ecology include Karl Butzer and David Stoddart.
• The second form of cultural ecology introduced decision theory from agricultural economics, particularly inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov and Ester Boserup. These cultural ecologists were concerned with how human groups made decisions about how they use their natural environment. They were particularly concerned with the question of agricultural intensification, refining the competing models of Thomas Malthus and Boserup.
• Notable cultural ecologists in this second tradition include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner II. Starting in the 1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism from political ecology. Political ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the local-scale systems they studied and the global political economy. Today few geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural ecology have been adopted and built on by political ecology, land change science, and sustainability science.
• The Cultural Ecology theory considers how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself. The study of the environment’s effects on humans was especially prevalent in the 1950s-1970s when Julian Steward founded the anthropological theory of Cultural Ecology. Steward defined Cultural Ecology in his 1955 book, The Theory of Cultural Change, as “a heuristic device for understanding the effect of environment upon culture.”
• Cultural Ecology focuses on how cultural beliefs and practices helps human populations adapt to their environments and live within the means of their ecosystem. It contributes to social organization and other human institutions. Cultural Ecology also interprets cultural practices in terms of their long-term role in helping humans adapt to their environment. For example, about 10 million Yaks live on the Tibetan plateau and are therefore commonly used in Tibetan culture for transportation and subsistence needs.
• The Cultural Ecology theory can be used to analyze the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects behaviors of exchange. For example, the potlatch tradition of the Pacific Coast native cultures encourages people to redistribute their belongings within the community. This tradition increases prestige and social bonds while meeting the community’s subsistence needs.
• Cultural Ecology views culture as evolutionary-the cultural adaptations have come as the result of a changing environment. However, Steward looks at the evolution as multi-linear, as opposed to the early anthropological theories that saw societies as uni-linear and working towards one main goal: civilization. It recognizes that each environment requires different adaptations and that not every culture is working towards the same “norm”.
• Also, on the conceptual as well as methodological level, cultural ecology has steadily made an effort to combine both the ideas and the approaches of the natural and social sciences. In this way, cultural ecology seeks to explain the social sciences by the means of the natural sciences. It uses the environmental pressures as explanations for cultural change. It therefore recognizes the ways in which different societies adapt differently not as a result of intelligence, but as a result of their climate.